After the terrible tragedy in Fukushima, the cleanup and damage assessment has begun. A robot operator, known only as [S.H.] has decided to write a blog about their efforts.  As pictured above, they are using [iRobot] models, including the [510 Packbot], and the [710 Warrior].

Since cleanup efforts started, [S.H.] was posting on his or her blog daily.  After word of this blog started getting out via various social media outlets, the blog was mysteriously taken down. The blog was at times critical of elements of the cleanup effort, but it’s unknown why the disappearance happened. Efforts to reach [S.H.] were unsuccessfull according to [IEEE].

Fortunately, before the takedown, [IEEE]‘s [Erico Guizzo] decided to make a copy of the posts. These have been translated into English and portions are now available at the link listed above. Be sure to check out robot training video after the break.

[Francisco] is helping his mother with a repair to the headlight knob on her Ford Ranger. Above you can see the broken knob on the left, and what it is supposed to look like on the right (taken from [Francisco's] own vehicle for reference). We’ve encountered split shafts on plastic knobs before and decided it was not something that could be fixed. But he didn’t give up so easily. He mentions that you can purchase a replacement for a few bucks, but he has the means to repair the knob by machining a metal bushing.

The idea is that you mill a metal ring whose inner diameter matches what the outer diameter of the plastic shaft should be. By inserting the broken knob in the ring, the plastic is held tightly together as if it had never broken. In the video after the break [Francisco] uses a metal pencil body from his junk box and a mini-lathe to cut the bushing to length, and mill the inner diameter to his specifications.

He talks about the difficulty of getting replacement parts in Chile, where he lives. But we think this kind of thrift is a great example for all hackers. If you’ve got the tools why not use them? And if you don’t have them, here’s a great excuse to procure them!

One of the perks of writing for Hackaday is that we often find hacks that we’ve been meaning to do ourselves. Here’s one that will let us fix our borked ASUS computer monitor buttons. [Silviu] has the same monitor we do, an ASUS VW202, and had the same problem of stuck buttons. We already cracked ours open and realized that the buttons are not easily replaced (you’ve got to source the right one). We just unstuck the offender and vowed not to press that button again, but [Silviu] actually figured out how to disassemble and repair the PCB mount switches.

As with most consumer electronics these days the worst part of the process is getting the monitor’s case apart. The plastic bezel has little spring tabs all around it that must be gently pried apart. Once the PCB which hosts the buttons was removed, he took the metal housing off of the broken switch. Inside he found that a bit of metal particulate (leftovers from manufacturing?) were causing the problem. A quick cleaning with a cotton swab removed the debris and got the tactile switch working again.

[glytch] sent in a tutorial on replacing dying capacitors on a motherboard, and we honestly can’t think of a better subject for an introductory tutorial. There’s nothing like having your friends think you’re a wizard for bringing broken electronics back from the grave.

For the repair a dead motherboard was [glytch]‘s quarry. After taking a look at the board, he found a few bulging caps that were ready to burst. After ordering a few caps with the same voltage, capacitance, and dimensions (trust us, you want the same size cap), [glytch] took an iron and desoldering braid to the board and replaced a few caps.

Sooner or later, all capacitors are going to go break down. This isn’t always a bad thing – we picked up quite a few “broken LCD monitors” in the years after the capacitor plague and repaired them with a few dollars worth of caps. A lot of the caps in our late 80s computers have been replaced, and these machines are still chugging along.

[Dave] has an ASUS tablet PC with a little problem. The device is charged via the docking connector’s USB cable when plugged into a special wall transformer. The problem is that the wall unit tends to overheat, and is shut down by a thermister inside to avoid permanent damage. The word on the Internet is to drop it in a zipper bag and chill it in the freezer for a bit. Although this works, it’s not the permanent solution that he was looking for. Instead, he hit the parts bin and built his own power supply replacement without buying anything.

The device is simply looking for 12V on the power pin (pin 1) of the USB cable. [Dave] dug through his mountain of unused AC adapters and found one that fit the voltage and current specs of the stock unit. He also grabbed a dusty old motherboard and plucked the USB ports off of the back. A bit of protoboard makes for a good base to connect the AC adapter wires to the ports, which was then covered with one big shrink tube. The result is seen above, and demonstrated in the clip after the break.

It happens to the best of designers, spending untold amounts of time designing a complex device just to find out that you missed a trace, or you couldn’t rout something to something else. As time marches on its becoming a bit less common to pop open a commercially produced device and see a little jumper wire or 2 flying across a pcb, or a resistor straddling an IC.

But when [Ilektron] opened up a Yamaha Dolby Pro Logic receiver to scavenge for parts he saw a very big “oops” and a even wilder fix. The maker took a pair of relays, flipped them “belly up” and hot glued them into place on top of a pair of ICs. Then the mess was “dead bug” wired to the circuit using insulated and uninsulated bus wire, contacts were then reinforced / insulated using more hot glue.

This is one of the most hacky fix we have seen in a commercially produced product, but we would love to hear your amusing horror stories of “WTH did they do?” So join us in the comments after the break.

For camera fanatics the acquisition of an old camera is a thrilling event. But if you’re going to collect them, you’d better have some repair skills so that you can also use them. [Fernando's] latest find was this Minox 35mm camera. The aperture needed cleaning, and after reassembling the unit he realized the he had not marked the focus ring when taking it apart. This is not a reflex camera, so you can’t look in the view finder to adjust focus. He came up with his own method to get the focus ring calibrated.

The focal point needs to focus on the film. He simulated this plane using some magic tape, which removes easily without leaving a residue. When the shutter is open, you can see the image projected on this translucent surface. He then set up the camera with the lens 90 cm from a bright light bulb. By adjusting the focus to create a sharp image on the temporary screen, he knows the focus is calibrated, and can reset the focus ring to the 0.9m mark.

Need some help developing that exposed film? You could always give the coffee and vitamin C hack a try.

When a few lights in the dashboard of  [Garrett]‘s truck burned out, he was looking at a hefty repair bill. The repair shop would have to replace the huge PCB to change a few soldered light bulbs, so he was looking at a $500 repair bill. Lighting up a LED is everyone’s first project, so [Garrett] decided to change out the bulbs with LEDs and save a few dollars.

The repair was very simple – after removing the dials and needles, [Garrett] found a huge PCB with a few burnt out bulbs on board. He took a multimeter to each bulb’s solder pad and replaced each one with an LED and resistor. The finished project looks like it came out of a factory and is a huge improvement over the ugly amber bulbs originally found in his truck.  [Garrett] also posted a nice Instructable of his build showing the nicely soldered lamp replacements.

It looks like Null Space Labs has a new pick and place machine. This immense repair job began when [Charliex] and [Gleep] found a JukiPlacemat 360 pick and place machine. The idea of having their very own pick and place machine proved intoxicating, possibly too much so because the didn’t return the machine when they found out it wasn’t working.

After a ton of work that involved adding a camera, [Charliex] and the rest of the builders at Null Space Labs finally have their own pick and place machine that works. This was a complete rebuild from the ground up. So many things didn’t work on the machine, they might have been better off building one from scratch. Aside from the massive effort that went into turning the shell of a machine into a working unit, we really have to commend everyone who worked on it.

The team added a nice GUI to control the machine. The guys have already run a successful test and ovened a few boards, so everything works as it should have at purchase. It’ll be great for making next year’s LayerOne conference badges.

When [Todd Harrison’s] Christmas lights stayed on well past the pre-defined shut off time, he knew there was something wrong with the timer. He took the device into his workshop and spent some time diagnosing and repairing the device, a process he recorded for all to see.

After busting the screw-less timer open with a hammer, he inspected the PCB for any apparent signs of damage. After seeing what looked like a damaged transistor, he desoldered it from the board for testing. After the transistor passed his tests with flying colors, [Todd] assumed that the fault had to be in the relay which the transistor was responsible for switching.

Sure enough, the relay had shorted out, and upon cutting it open he found that the contact points were fused together. He separated and sanded the contacts down, enabling him to get the timer working – at least for the time being.

Part of [Todd’s] goal with this video was to show off different methods of desoldering, including a manual solder sucker (my favorite), desoldering braid, and a purpose built desoldering iron. If you’re in the market for some desoldering tools, but don’t know what to buy, [Todd] is more than happy to offer his advice.

Continue reading to see a video of [Todd's] troubleshooting process.

One of the benefits of working in IT is that there is typically a healthy supply of miscellaneous, half-functioning equipment to mess around with. [Vittore] had an old laptop with a busted LCD sitting around (Google Translation), so he figured he might as well get it to do something useful. With a spare desktop LCD panel and some software tweaking, he built himself a slick network monitoring panel that hangs in his office.

He stripped the laptop down to the bare essentials, and mounted it along with an LCD screen in a plexiglass enclosure. He has Nagios running a server in his office, and with the help of a few plugins, he created a simple web interface that show him the topology of his entire network. The panel itself runs a live version of Debian, which he configured to load up his Nagios web page each time it is started.

While having the ability to view the status of every network-connected device in an instant is great, he didn’t stop there. While browsing around online, he found diagram for a simple USB-based performance monitor that uses a PIC to drive a pair of VU meters. He hooked the meters up to a router monitored by Nagios, so he can watch office’s bandwidth usage in real time.

If you’re interested in seeing how it was built, be sure to check out the Flickr photo set put together by [Vittore’s] co-worker [Matthew].

There’s a ton of devices out there that have batteries in them but most people never think about it. That’s because they use rechargeables that are sealed inside and topped off with external chargers. [Todd Harrison] has a couple of them, including a cordless shaver and a Christmas light timer. He’s had these for years and the batteries have gone south. They’re not meant to be consumer-replaceable, but that did stop him from cracking them open and swapping out the solder-tab batteries himself.

The batteries themselves won’t be all that hard to source. The shaver just takes a NiMH AA cell. But since they’re not meant to be replaced [Todd] needed to do some soldering. Here you can see he’s using a solder gun to make the connection between the new battery and one of the solder tabs. He uses the gun instead of an iron because he needs to heat the joint quickly, and must avoid heating the rest of the cell which could rupture. As a safety precaution he’s wearing gloves and a full face-shield.

Check out the video after the break to see this, as well as the coin cell replacement in the lighting controller.

It seems that there’s a whole range of Toshiba Satellite laptop computers that suffer from a power jack design that is prone to breaking. We see some good and some bad in this. The jack is not mounted to the circuit board, so if it gets jammed into the body like the one above it doesn’t hose the electronics. But what has happened here is the plastic brackets inside the case responsible for keeping the jack in place have failed. You won’t be able to plug in the power adapter unless you figure out a way to fix it.

We’d wager the hardest part of this repair is getting the case open. Once inside, just cut away all of the mangled support tabs to make room for the replacement jack. The one used here has a threaded cuff that makes it a snap to mount the new part to the case. Clip off the old jack and solder the wires (mind the polarity!) and you’re in business.

Anyone know why we don’t see more of the magnetic connectors (MagSafe) that the Apple laptops have? Is it a patent issue?

[Thanks Dan]

As many of us do, [Steaky] serves as a kind of on-call help desk for his family. His father in law recently contacted him because his pan and tilt webcam died, and he wanted to see if it could be fixed. Never turning down a challenge, [Steaky] decided to give it a shot.

He ended up having to disassemble it since the camera was completely unresponsive, and what he found inside piqued his interest. The no-name camera sported an ARM microprocessor at its core, and it seems that some of its pins were damaged due to a poorly designed case. He figured resoldering the pins would do the trick, but that wasn’t the end of his adventures.

As he dug deeper into the device, he found that the camera essentially killed itself, reading and writing data to the wrong places due to the damaged pins on the processor. After plenty of searching around, he was able to find a somewhat compatible firmware image, though not everything worked properly.

His father in law was so impressed with his work that he asked for the camera back, even though [Steaky] hadn’t fully repaired it yet. While he bid the camera goodbye, we’re pretty sure he’d be more than happy to reclaim it for a few days if any of our readers had some additional insight or resources that might help him finish the job.

[Spode] has been rocking out with a pair of Shure E4C earphones for about six years now, and he has no intentions of buying another set any time soon. The earphones cost him £200, so when the right channel started acting up, he decided to fix them rather than toss them in the trash bin.

His first attempt was successful, but just barely so. He ended up damaging the earphone case pretty badly, and in time the same problem reappeared. Undeterred, he opted to fix them once again, but this time around he did things differently.

Upon disassembling them, he found that his repair job had become frayed over time. [Spode] desoldered both drivers from the wires and cut them back a bit to expose some nice clean (and structurally sound) cable. He spent a little more time carefully soldering things back together to mitigate the chances of having to repair them again before replacing both earphone shells with a bit of black Sugru.

Having saved himself £200, [Spode] is quite happy with the repair. We probably would have tied an underwriter’s knot in each cable before soldering them to the drivers in the name of strain relief, though the Sugru should help with that.